Raising Happiness

Are you caught in a “Time Bind”—where you feel like you don’t have enough time to get your work done AND spend time with your children and spouse AND take care of your own basic needs?

Sociologists have been very excited about a “natural experiment” occurring in Korea. In 2004, the Korean government began mandating that businesses cut their workweek back, from six to five days. Researchers now have almost a decade of data about how these widespread changes have affected people’s satisfaction with their jobs and, importantly, with their lives.

What is exciting about this situation is that it should improve our understanding of how number of hours worked per week affects job and life satisfaction. We already have research that shows pretty clearly that working long hours is correlated with work-family conflict and other forms of misery—but we don’t know whether working long hours causes unhappiness or whether, say, unhappy people disproportionately work for companies which require longer hours.

If I regularly worked one less day per week, I think I would definitely be happier with my job, my work hours, and with my life overall. Truly, I can’t think of any maxed-out mom, or even just any working parent, who doesn’t dream of someone mandating that they work less.

That’s why I was surprised by the results: The most recently published study on this topic seems to show that the Korean Five-Day Working Reform did not have “the expected positive effects on worker well-being.” Ten years and one less workday per week, people aren’t happier with their jobs or their lives overall.

Say what? Despite a dramatic correlation between working less overtime and feeling happier, researchers didn’t find that the government-mandated reduction in work hours made people happier on average when they controlled for things like income. Their theory about why: Employers didn’t reduce employee workload when they reduced their work hours. Workers actually only reduced their work time by four “official” hours per week, not eight. This means workers had four fewer hours in which to do their work; either they crammed it in by working more efficiently in fewer, longer days, or they kept working the same amount of time but did their work off the books.

Maxed-out workers need less work, not less time to do the same amount of work. Part of what I find so harrowing about parenting is the time pressure. It’s stressful to have the same amount of work but less time in which to do it.

All this is to say that the obvious solution to our Time Bind—a government mandate that we work less—is probably not coming soon to a workplace near you.

But I’m not saying that our government doesn’t need to help maxed-out parents.

The problems plaguing working parents aren’t our own individual problems. It isn’t that we feel “overwhelmed and overworked simply because [we’ve] individually taken on too much or done a bad job coping with [our] responsibilities,” as Sharon Lerner writes in The War on Moms.

Our collective exhaustion is sociological. Its roots come from the way our society and economy is structured. As Katrina Alcorn puts it in Maxed Out, “We lack the social and systemic supports that we need in order to realize our potential and share our talents with the world.”

At the same time, we set ourselves up for a lot of disappointment, not to mention feelings of victimization, when we hold fast to the belief that we need to change our institutions—our government, our workplaces, our marriages—before we can be happy in life and productive and successful at work. There are three important things we can do to prevent our own breakdowns.

Next week I will lay out three strategies for preventing burnout among working parents that will help you step away from the brink of breakdown.

Raising Happiness

I just finished Katrina Alcorn’s gripping memoir, Maxed Out, about her nervous breakdown. Although it is an absorbing, can’t-put-it-down kind of a book, her breakdown—harrowing as it was—struck me as ordinary.

Ordinary in that her experience seems so common. Working parents are stressed. Women in particular are really suffering: They report record-high use of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. By some reputable reports, nearly a quarter of American woman use a prescription medication for depression or anxiety. 1 (Men tend to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, and report higher rates of addiction and alcohol.2)

I was a 37-year-old mother of three and somehow, my kids, my marriage, and my career were all thriving.

Then, one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2009, while driving to Target to buy diapers, I broke down. Not my car. Me.

I pulled over to the side of the road, my hands shaking, barely able to breathe. I called my husband and sobbed, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Thus ended my career, and thus began a journey into crippling depression, anxiety, and insomnia; medication, meditation, and therapy. As I learned to heal my body and my mind, I searched for answers to one question: What the hell happened to me?

I first met Katrina at a woman-led tech firm (which was recently bought-up by Facebook). Ironically, I was there as a consultant working on a happiness app for the iPhone. Katrina was successfully leading a team of hipsters doing cutting edge work—and slowly but surely having a full-on nervous breakdown.

She ended up in bed for a year, crushed by burn-out so thorough and unexpected that her friends had to bring her family food and drive her kids to day care while she recovered.

Most of us feel pretty lucky and very grateful to be Americans. Dysfunctional as it may sometimes be, our government remains the world’s oldest and arguably its most stable democracy. The majority of Americans experience material wealth and abundance unknown in many parts of the world. And those of us in California and many other parts of the country are blessed with natural beauty and national parks so stunning that they inspire awe and wonder in all but only the most hardened among us.

But our policies for working families are shameful.

It isn’t that working sucks—if we are lucky, like Katrina Alcorn, we love our work. Most parents want to do meaningful work outside of our homes. It’s just that our workplaces aren’t set up to allow us enough time to take care of ourselves (say, by getting enough sleep) and raise our children and work outside the home.

This Time Bind, artfully described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1990s in her book of that title, is a problem that we won’t solve by “leaning in” to our work (as Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg advises us to do in her book about the problems that plague women in the workforce today).

Despite the publicity around a recent study that supposedly shows that working less doesn’t make people happier—more on that next week—I believe that we are still grappling with Hochschild’s time bind, all these years and technological advances later.

But what are we to do if we are feeling MAXED OUT? The owner of Alcorn’s company, a mother of three herself, advised her to hire a “mother’s helper,” to assist with homework and dinnertime. Sandberg has a team of paid folks helping her with household and child-related tasks. But hiring more help isn’t a feasible, or even desirable, solution for most of us. Would working less make us happier?

Next week I’ll look more closely at some new research related to this question.

—————————-
1. Bindley, Katherine. “Women And Prescription Drugs: One In Four Takes Mental Health Meds.” Huffington Post. 2011.
2. Kessler, Ronald C., et al. “Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication.” Archives of General Psychiatry 62.6 (2005): 617.
3.Joan C. Williams of the Center for Work Life Law and Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress called “The Three Faces of Work-family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle.” Published January 2010. - See more at: http://www.workingmomsbreak.com/just-the-facts/#sthash.4G1K4JM9.dpuf

When I was graduating from college, I didn’t look for work that I felt passionate about because I assumed there were no good jobs that would involve my interests. My intention was to get the most prestigious, high-paying job I could. At that time, corporations recruited on Ivy League campuses, and I interviewed for advertising and brand management jobs that seemed to fit my internship experiences and creativity.

I landed a prestigious and high-paying job in marketing management. Unfortunately, I hated the job. I didn’t feel like I was actually doing anything but clocking in, checking tasks off a list, and heading home. I started therapy for anxiety. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted in life.

When I started studying the sociology of happiness six years later, my world was set ablaze. No one else particularly thought what I was doing was a great idea; one professor told me to “at least stop calling it happiness” if I was studying “subjective well-being,” because people were going to think that I was “not very smart.” After my struggle with anxiety in corporate America, I could have cared less what others thought of me. I paid no attention to what type of research was going to get me a tenured track position; I was too thrilled by all I was learning. I think it worked out pretty well for me.

And I’m not alone. In my first post in this series on grit and elite performance, I emphasize how success requires a whole lot of practice, which can often be unpleasurable. Yet the consistent and deliberate practice of elite performers is nearly always fueled by innate interest in what they’re doing.

Research convincingly shows that when we perceive a child as being innately talented or gifted, or as showing great promise for something, what we are really perceiving is interest, not talent. A four year-old who pretends to play the violin with a stick and demonstrates an unusual interest in classical music does, indeed, show promise as a violinist. She does not, however, show talent yet. Her interest in the music at such an early age may stimulate a lot of things that lead her to virtuosity, like early music instruction and parents who encourage her to practice deliberately and consistently. But early interest is not the same as early achievement. As we saw in the first post in this series, achievement takes both effort and skill, neither of which the four year old has had enough time to develop.

Here’s the bottom line: The practice and effort that leads to success and happiness over the long run is fueled by intrinsic desire, not hard-driving parents or social expectations. In fact, my passion for the science of happiness probably developed better—and my chances for success increased—because there was no one pushing me to achieve.

Falling down
So passion is one more thing—in addition to rigorous practice and strategic resting—that elite performers have in common. All that passion comes in especially handy when we consider another important ingredient to success: failure.

Elite performers turn adversity into success. Most greats don’t just pile up one achievement after the next. Failure is a key part of growth and, eventually, elite performance: J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected by 12 publishers (and before she even wrote the book she suffered a stream of potentially devastating personal failures). Michael Jordon was cut from his high school basketball team. Abraham Lincoln, probably the most famous example of failure contributing to success, suffered a series of lost elections (along with some notable successes) before he went on to become one of our greatest presidents.

Consider that 75 percent of all people experience some form of trauma in life, and about 20 percent of all people are likely to experience a traumatic life-event within a given year. So the odds are good that our lives aren’t going to be free from pain and suffering, no matter how well-off or well-positioned we are. (That said, socioeconomic status does matter; while wealth doesn’t insure us against many disasters, it does make many types of adverse life-events fewer and farther between.)

Since adversity in life is a given, our success and happiness depend on our ability not just to cope with it but to actually grow because of it. Professionally, we have the greatest potential to grow when we challenge ourselves in our field just beyond our comfort zone. This means risking fear, embarrassment, errors, or even full-blown failure. And it means gaining new skills and abilities that contribute to our greater mastery and success in the future.

Because grit is a combination of persistence and passion, adversity plays a significant role in helping us develop both of those qualities. Interestingly, a vast body of scientific research shows that the stress we experience as a result of adversity—and how we respond to that stress—tends to predict how much we will benefit from it. The people who report the most growth following hardship are not the people who are entirely stress-resistant in the face of adversity. Instead, the people who grow the most are actually the ones who are a little “shaken up,” and even exhibit a degree of posttraumatic stress. So if we don’t feel some stress in the face of a difficult situation, odds are we won’t grow from it.

Failure—and adversity in general—is life’s great teacher. While there might not be anything good in misfortune, as Viktor Frankl wisely reminds us, it is often possible to wrench something good out of misfortune. We know that adverse life-events—a plane crash, a terrorist bombing, breast cancer—can trigger depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress syndrome. But what most of us don’t realize is that posttraumatic growth, as researchers call it, can also awaken us to new strength and wisdom. Misfortune—even tragedy—has the potential to give our lives new meaning and a new sense of purpose, and in this way, adversity also contributes to the passion part of the grit equation.

Stephen Joseph, a preeminent expert on posttraumatic growth and the author of What Doesn’t Kill Us, puts it like this: “Adversity, like the grit that creates the pearl, is often what propels people to become more true to themselves, take on new challenges, and view life from a wider perspective.”

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About this Blog

I’m Christine Carter, Ph.D, a sociologist and happiness expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. This blog is mostly science-based parenting advice: since I’m reading all the research related to raising happy children anyway, I thought we might as well make it useable to parents. My intention is to bring a scientific framing (what does the research actually say?) to our opinion-based parenting debates and advice. Sorting fact from fiction can be confusing when it comes to parenting.

This blog is also about me and my children. It represents the intersection of my brain and my heart: my intellectual training in the social sciences and my very real, sometimes raw, experiences as a mother.

This workshop is an introduction to Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), an empirically-supported training program based on the pioneering research of Kristin Neff and the clinical perspective of Chris Germer.